Well as predicted, our much publicized and anticipated ferry is no more. The company that was contracted to operate the service bailed, claiming that it wouldn't...and couldn't make money. It didn't last six months. Can't say I'm surprised.
To the dismay of many tourists who come here to visit, Pensacola, Florida is a coastal city but it is not actually on the beach as you might expect. To get to the beach you have to travel over eight miles from downtown to Santa Rosa Island, a thin strip of tenuous, fragile "land" that is mostly national seashore.
To the dismay of many tourists who come here to visit, Pensacola, Florida is a coastal city but it is not actually on the beach as you might expect. To get to the beach you have to travel over eight miles from downtown to Santa Rosa Island, a thin strip of tenuous, fragile "land" that is mostly national seashore.
It's been a long-time dream of some to have a ferry boat service that linked downtown Pensacola with Pensacola Beach. Trouble is, those two points are not exactly close. There are two bridges that must be crossed, and one of them charges $1.00 toll. Plus, if you look at the above map, there's a big ol' peninsula of Gulf Breeze jutting out into Pensacola Bay which provides something of a roadblock to people going from the city to the beach by both land and sea. (The main part of the beach is where the smaller of the two bridges comes across.)
Nevertheless, a group consisting of the Pensacola City Council, the Escambia County Commission, the Santa Rosa Island Authority, the National Park Service and the Navy conspired to initiate a ferry service. One can only imagine the LSD-infused, circle-jerk meetings in which they all convinced each other that such a thing would be a Really Good Idea. (I'm envisioning the cemetery scene from the movie, "Easy Rider.")
Nevertheless, a group consisting of the Pensacola City Council, the Escambia County Commission, the Santa Rosa Island Authority, the National Park Service and the Navy conspired to initiate a ferry service. One can only imagine the LSD-infused, circle-jerk meetings in which they all convinced each other that such a thing would be a Really Good Idea. (I'm envisioning the cemetery scene from the movie, "Easy Rider.")
But a ferry service costs money. Ticket booths and waiting areas/shelters/restrooms would have to be built; docks would have to be modified with fencing and gates; boats would have to be procured and outfitted; employees would need to be hired... There would have to advertising, and government approvals. These are up-front costs that cannot be deferred until the revenue starts rolling in.
The City opined that the ferries could carry as many as 900 passengers per day. At $20 per ticket that could be $18,000 per day which, if you like to blow smoke up peoples' butts, you might (informally, not-for-publication!) extrapolate that and project a monthly gross revenue of $540,000. Not bad!
It wouldn't be that high, of course, because some of those passengers would have tickets that were discounted (e.g “frequent-flyer,” military, group, senior citizen...) And of course it would not be 900 passengers per day every day. Weekends would be busier, weekdays would be slack. The City did not say whether they thought that “900” was a weekly average or just what a busy Saturday and Sunday might generate. But it was a nice round number. Except...I'm not sure who came up with it. It's almost as if they pulled it out of their...umm, hat. Many of us were skeptical because we know that getting Americans to give up their pickup trucks is a tough sell.
The BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig disaster in 2010 proved to be a blessing-in-disguise for the Gulf Coast. The Pensacola area received millions in punitive damage compensation for the harm to our tourism industry. On TV, our beaches were made to look like the shoreline of Alaska after that hungover, sleeping skipper of the Exxon Valdez oil tanker let the galley hand drive the boat and run it aground. It wasn't as bad a the media made it out to be, but the touristas did stay away for the better part of two years.
The National Park Service got $5.2 million from BP. City and County leaders prevailed on the NPS to use some of that money (maybe all of it!) to purchase two ferry boats. Once that was done they contracted with a supposedly-experienced company that ran similar ferry services in other parts of the country. The protracted process of getting this thing going! was actually making some progress. Construction of docks and infrastructure was finally begun in 2017. After many delays, ferry service began on June 22, 2018.
Here's a route map of our ferry service. You can see that it originates from downtown and stops both at Fort Pickens National Seashore and Pensacola Beach
By early October, things were looking grim. Gulf Coast Maritime Services (GCMS), the company that ran the ferry reported that in the first three months of operation, 5600 passengers had been carried. Due to these less-than-expected numbers, George Aswad, owner and operator of GCMS announced that they were cutting out weekday service, adding that if ridership didn't improve he was not optimistic that the service could survive. Spoiler alert: It did not. By the end of October GCMS had called it quits. Obviously they had some sort of “early-out” termination clause in their contract.
Let's do some math! 5600 people at $20 per ticket is only $112,000...or about $37,000 per month, give or take. I'd bet that the amount of money they spent on diesel fuel was pretty close to that! Nevermind lease fees, payroll, insurance, debt service and God-knows-what-else. Hoo-boy!
Oddly, nobody was tracking where the passengers were from (e.g. Locals? Tourists?). The spokesman for the National Park Service said that “anecdotally” it appeared they were mostly locals, which would make sense. So his thinking was that if they were able to get the word out to visitors before arriving here, then the ferry ridership might improve. Thus, VisitPensacola and the local hotels were solicited to push the ferry service when people either asked about coming here or made actually made reservations. (I didn't take Marketing in college, and I'm no genius, but I'd imagine that would be one of the first things you'd do, not the last.) But it was a classic case of "too little/too late."
Businesses are so focused on immediate profits these days. Companies live and die by the quarterly results. And if next quarter doesn't look more promising than last quarter, CEO's are quick to cut-and-run. Shareholders aren't going to put up with this... I mean, look at General Motors! Who would've ever thought in a million years that they'd be basically getting out of the car business?
I'm kind of surprised that the Pensacola ferry service was set up as an unsubsidized endeavor. In addition to buying the boats, the government consortium should have set some of that BP money aside for operations – at least for the first year. Forcing GCMS to be a profit-making venture from the get-go was a bad, bad idea. It was doomed before it began. Such a service needs time to develop its market...time to get the word out and get people accustomed to using it as an alternative to driving to the beach. That doesn't happen overnight.
So now the two ferry boats sit idle, tied up at the pier in Pensacola, not preserved or even in drydock. They are deteriorating on a daily basis. They will obviously be sold – at a loss, I'm sure. Construction on the terminals has ceased. The grand scheme to have a ferry service in Pensacola appears to have failed.
And there they are, the two Pensacola ferries sitting forlornly at our almost-completed downtown terminal. (Oh, and I couldn't help but get the Sportster in the picture. Sorry.)
2 comments:
I remember going to Panama City Beach after that disaster and expecting waves of oil lapping the shores. Instead I found maybe a dozen tar balls washed up on shore over the course of a week.
Up here, numerous such poorly thought out ventures occur based upon grossly inflated estimates. The current rage is building huge civic centers out here in rural Iowa for plays and such. Generally what happens after they fail to make money is that they just become taxpayer burdens from thence on out. We just paid tens of millions to refurbish ours since the tens of millions we have paid to support it over the last 15 years evidently didn't include maintenance.
I hope they sell those ferry boats at a loss and don't make it a taxpayer burden for the indefinite future.
Ironically, we're in pretty much the same situation with our own Civic Center. Maintenance? What's that? And similarly, the argument is whether it's cheaper to fix the place up or tear it down and build a new one. Amazing.
But it's funny how that stuff works, eh Ed? Big schemes are always sold to the government with the promise of tens, dozens or even hundreds of JOBS! or some other ancillary "benefit" to the area. They get approved, usually with big tax incentives for the people doing the proposal. And it's so obvious sometimes that the powers-that-be must *know* they will eventually fail. Around here we have so many vacant "white elephant" buildings of businesses that went under, and yet they keep building more!
Nobody likes people are are negative and against all "progress." Nevertheless, I'm often tempted to ask of our politiians, "Are you guys stupid? Have you learned NOTHING from history?"
In the case of our much-ballyhooed ferry service, I'm not sure anyone, not even the politicians believed the blue-sky projections of how great it was going to be and how it would alleviate weekend traffic out on the beach (which is awful, by the way). I mean, who would use it? People don't usually go to the beach with just the clothes they have on. No, usually there backpacks and coolers, umbrellas and chairs...you know, all the things you need when planning a day out in the sun.
Load up the car/truck, then drive to downtown. Then unload all your crap and lug it over to the ferry terminal. At the beach (soundside dock), unload all your crap yet again(!) from the boat and schlep it all the way over to the gulf side, wishing that somebody had thought to start a free tram service from here to there. Oh yeah, great plan!
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